HIS 241Alexander I and Napoleon remarks by Professor Evans

The Alexander Column, located on Palace Square in front of the Winter
Palace, honors Tsar Alexander I and the Russian victory over Napoleon
in the 1812 campaign. It was designed by Auguste Ricard de
Montferrand and erected between 1830 and 1834. It consists of a
single block of red granite resting on a pedestal; that resting on
staves driven into the marshy soil. There are some better images
of the Column available, but then again since I took this one myself, I
tend to like it! See:www.saint-petersburg.com/virtual-tour/alexander-column.aspAlexander Column

Historians have traditionally
divided the reign of Alexander I into the good-intentioned first half
followed by the reactionary second half (sound familiar?) with the dividing line being
Napoleon's 1812 invasion of Russia. In the first part of the
reign, the tsar and his Unofficial Committee, composed of Prince Adam
Czartoryski, Count Pavel Stroganov, Count Viktor Kochubei and
Nikolai Novosiltsev considered various reform plans
for Russia. The consideration of reform advanced as far as
Mikhail Speranskii proposing
a constitution for Russia (I have a copy of Speranskii's proposal in Russian, but I have not yet had time to translate it.), but aside from some governmental and
educational reforms, which indeed were important, there were no
fundamental constitutional changes enacted. Historians have come
up with many reasons for the failure of the tsar to actually do
something, including the tsar's own
personality, but you also have to consider that Russia was almost
continuously preoccupied with Napoleon in one form or another from 1798
until 1815. (Already in the Italian Campaign of 1799, Aleksandr Suvorov
(1729-1800) had lead Russian armies to victories against the French in
the wars of the second coalition.) So, the entire first half of
Aleksandr's reign, "the era of good intentions," was spent either being at war
with Napoleon, or technically in alliance with Napoleon after the 1807 Treaty of Tilsit. (Read a short account by a British agent at Tilsit?)

The 1812 campaign

Napoleon's invasion of Russia
began on 23 June 1812 (You will occasionally see somewhat different
dates ranging anywhere from 21 to 24 June.). Estimates of the size of Napoleon's Grand Armee vary
considerably, but historians have generally settled upon the figure of
500,000 men. Just try to imagine the problems of coordinating and
supplying an army that large two hundred years ago! The Russians
were initially able to field anywhere from 250,000 to 400,000 men to
oppose Napoleon (The Russians would be able to increase that number as
the campaign went on.).

The Narva Gate, erected in
St. Petersburg to commemorate the Russian victory over Napoleon. (Some of my pictures are better than
others!)

With the continuing retreat of the Russian army in the face of
Napoleon's advance, and with calls for a "Russian" general to take
command of the Russian armies, on 17 August the tsar finally appointed Prince Mikhail Kutuzov
(1745-1813) as commander-in-chief of the Russian armies. Kutuzov had served
with distinction in the Russia military since 1764! But Alexander I had
let Kutuzov, popularly known as the "fox of the North," take the blame
for the Russian defeat at the Battle of Austerlitz in 1805. (Kutuzov
had argued against the allied decision to do battle with Napoleon.) Now it was
Kutuzov's turn to deal with Napoleon again.

Borodino

After
taking control of the Russian armies, Kutuzov continued to retreat
until he finally reached a defensive position at the village of
Borodino, about 100 km. west of Moscow. There the French and
Russian armies met in the Battle of Borodino on 26 August (7 September),
the bloodiest single day of battle of the Napoleonic wars.
Napoleon, wanting a smashing victory, threw everything that he had at
the Russian defensive positions--Not quite, Napoleon refused to commit
his elite guard of 25,000 soldiers to the battle. He is reported to have said: "I will not have my Guard
destroyed. When you are 800 leagues from France you do not wreck
your last reserve"--But the
Russian lines held against the French attacks. At the end of the long day of battle, the Russians
were still on the field of battle. An inconclusive draw, but in
reality maybe an enormous moral victory for the Russians. Under the
cover of night, Kutuzov withdrew his forces.The French spent the day after the battle counting bodies and
tending wounded.

Casualty estimates for the battle are imprecise. "The French are said to have
suffered 28,000 dead and wounded including 48 generals, according to
historian Adam Zamoyski."
Other estimates put the French losses as high as 50,000. It is
generally accepted that the Russians losses were somewhere around
44,000 and 23 generals. That is an extremely high casualty rate
for one day of battle.

Eventually, the Russian retreat
continued, and
it was decided that there was no way to defend Moscow. So the
city was
abandoned/evacuated. When Napoleon reached Moscow, he expected
Alexander I to meet him and offer a Russian surrender. Napoleon
figured that since one of
the Russian capitals had been captured, a surrender was in order, but
there was no
Alexander to be found with the keys to the city or surrender
offers. Then fires broke out in the city. (Legend has it
that
the fires were the result of Russian sabotage; common sense has it that
that is what happened when you stick thousands of French occupying
soldiers in a deserted city made of wood.) Between 2-6/14-18
September, Moscow almost completely burned to the ground.

Battle of Maloyaroslavets

With the prospects of winter
fast approaching, Napoleon decided that he did not want to spend the
Russian winter in a burned-out city. On 19 October, Napoleon
abandoned the city and headed towards the southwest, into the
Ukraine where he reasoned he could find provisions for his troops
(remember Charles XII). What sealed the destruction of the French
army, was the
small Battle of Maloiaroslavets,
really just a skirmish, that took place on 24 October. Kutuzov
was able to turn the French from their intended advance southwest back
onto the very same route they had used on their way into Russia, i.e., the
Smolensk High Road. That meant that their would be few supplies for
the French to find on their way out of Russia since they had already eaten everything on their way in. In addition,
Cossacks and other irregular Russian partisan forces could continually
operate against any French stragglers. The French retreat quickly turned bad.

Berezina

For the French, the ultimate disaster
occurred when the remnants of the army tries to cross the ice-swollen
Berezina River in Western Russia, while literally surrounded by the
Russian army. Really, it was only the incredible heroism on the
part of the French engineers and rear guard that saved what was left of
Napoleon's army. See,

The Russian campaign resulted
in an enormous loss of life. Of the 500,000 or more
troops that Napoleon counted as part of his invasion force, only about
20,000 maybe left Russia in December 1812. The Russians also
probably lost between 400,000 and 450,000 soldiers with accompanying, enormous,
and generally uncounted, civilian losses. So, the total
campaign casualties were probably easily around a million.

ps. Well we can't really mention Alexander I
without a quick discussion
of how he ascended to the throne of Russia. Now Catherine the
Great
and her husband, Peter III, who she had killed by her friends,
allegedly had one son (Paul I),
although there were some pretty legitimate questions at the time about whether
Peter III was
the father. It is actually relatively clear now that Peter III was not
the father; so that means that Paul I was not a legitimate male heir,
and thus the Romanov dynasty had come to an end with the death/murder
of Peter III.

With
good reason (the murder of his dad), Paul always resented Catherine
and her entire "enlightened" imperial court. When Paul assumed
the throne
of Russia in November 1796, he brought a new sense of Prussian
militarism to the
country, symbolized by his estate at Gatchina. This was in sharp
contrast to the Frenchified court of Catherine. (He also made sure that
Catherine was buried next to her murdered husband, Peter III, whose
remains were exhumed to also lay "in state" with Catherine!)

Paul had always been kept as far away from Catherine as possible, and
his oldest two sons,
Alexander and Constantine, had been removed from his care. They
were personally raised by Catherine and given a liberal and enlightened
education.

Monument to Paul 1 in front of Gatchina.

Once Paul was tsar, he quickly became very
unpopular even though many of the measures that he enacted do not
seem to have been all that bad from today's vantage point, such as
establishing a male line-of-inheritance to the throne of Russia--easy
to understand why he did that--freeing political prisoners, forbidding
the working of serfs on Sundays, and so forth. But Paul was also
very anti-French and pro-Prussian (and there were a lot of other quirky
manners that did not go over well with the imperial court.). Then
he led Russia into the Second Coalition against Napoleon and France,
only to suddenly changed his mind in 1800 and became friendly with
France against Great Britain.

A conspiracy was hatched to remove Paul as tsar with close friends of
the now-dead Catherine the Great as the chief conspirators, including Count Pahlen,
head of the police and Catherine's last lover, and Count Zubov. "On the night of
March 12/24, 1801, Pahlen, Count Bennigsen, and the
Zubov brothers Nikolai and Platon entered the Mikhailovskii Castle with
the assistance of a co-conspirator, an unfaithful aide-de-camp of
Paul's. They found the tsar's bed empty. The conspirators, who were
drunk, found their head of state hiding behind a screen in his chamber.
In an alcohol induced frenzy, they proceeded to murder the man to whom
they had sworn their loyalty." (www.alexanderpalace.org/palace/Paul.html) The extent of Alexander's actual
involvement in the plot against his dad remains a bit unclear since
Count Pahlen destroyed any surviving evidence of the conspiracy.
Perhaps Alexander had thought that his father would just be forced to
abdicate; instead his dad was killed. The Russian public was just
told that Paul died from a "cold" (Ok, I exaggerate a bit! The official announcement was "apoplexy.").